Our partner CATALOG has a vision to instead use nature’s data storage medium, perfected over billions of years: DNA.

Millions of times more data

DNA can store millions of times more data in the same volume as conventional data storage, can last thousands of years and is easily physically owned, even massive amounts of it. In October 2018, we announced our partnership with CATALOG, and plans for a machine that would encode data in DNA.

From the lab to the real world

The goal of the project was to take CATALOG’s unique and proprietary method for encoding data in DNA and to build the machine that supports the scaling up of the encoding process, reaching speeds that could take DNA data storage out of the lab and into the real world, moving towards a future where it’s economically viable to use DNA as the medium for long-term archival of data.

A landmark moment

Less than a year after the announcement, in July 2019, the ‘terabit machine’ achieved a landmark moment. It encoded the whole of the English-language Wikipedia into DNA, demonstrating success in terms of speed, scale and accuracy.

Making DNA data storage commercially viable requires significant advances in scalability – it’s simply too slow and expensive to be used for business and government use cases as it stands today.

The machine we developed with Cambridge Consultants brings DNA data storage out of the research lab and into the real world, for the first time in history.

Hyunjun Park

Co-founder and CEO, CATALOG Technologies

Massive digital data storage

What’s next commercially? CATALOG’s ambition is to become the world’s first DNA-based platform for massive digital data storage and biological computation. CATALOG has discussions underway with government agencies, major international science projects that generate huge amounts of test data, major firms in oil and gas, media and entertainment, finance, and other industries.

The challenge

Uniting engineering & biology

The project was an extremely challenging one. It required us to build a highly diverse team here at Cambridge Consultants to work with the similarly diverse researchers at CATALOG. It also showcased our ability to unite engineering, computer science and biology to solve complex problems and make radical new ideas a reality.

Entirely different approach

CATALOG’s proprietary method takes an entirely different approach than traditional thinking on DNA data storage. As an analogy, assume the information to be stored is a book, which can be stored by copying it. The traditional approach would go about this by transcribing the book from start to finish, letter for letter. This is a time consuming and expensive process. Further, if you want to store a different book, you must start again from scratch, meaning the cost would be doubled.

Faster & cheaper

The CATALOG approach can be thought of as building a printing press with typefaces. The company rearranges the typefaces (pre-made DNA molecules) to match the contents of the book. Because of this, the process is faster and cheaper. The incremental cost for printing different additional books is also significantly lower.

Stored for hundreds of years

Data will be encoded using the fragments of synthetic DNA and can be stored for hundreds of years with little or no power consumption. How’s that as a contribution towards saving the planet?